In Escape from Shady Acres (playing at the Toronto Fringe Festival), three seniors find common cause in busting out of their tyrannical old folks’ home.

Bernice (Colleen Simm) and Dolores (Corinne Sutton-Smith) are Stockholm Syndrome-y lifers, amusing themselves by imagining gentlemen callers and rehearsing for tomorrow’s YouTube show. When new arrival Shirley (Martha Breen) blows into town, the three begin scheming — but overseer Alistair (Tyler Morgan, who also wrote the script) is no pushover, and escape will not come easily.

Continue reading Escape from Shady Acres (Morgan Productions) 2019 Toronto Fringe Review →

What would you do for what you wanted? That is the question at heart of Peaches On A Cherry Tree playing at the Toronto Fringe Festival. It’s a dark, surrealistic production – a strange play, intentionally so.

Continue reading Peaches on a Cherry Tree (CujoLemieux) 2019 Toronto Fringe Review →

The most passionate can be the most toxic. The deepest pain can be the sweetest pleasure. Toronto Fringe Festival presents dance theatre investigation i feel you at the Randolph Theatre. It is a beautiful ode to the complexity of human connection.

Continue reading i feel you (The Cheshire Unicorn) 2019 Toronto Fringe Review →

If you want an inside look at the zany rehearsal process in the life of a Shakespearean actor, then Shakespeare-mash-up-parody  The Peers is a show for you. Toronto Fringe Festival presents The Peers at the Annex Theatre.

Continue reading The Peers (INFEMOUS) Toronto Fringe Review →

The Art of Kneading by Helen Knight (presented by Farenheight350) was a late entrant into the 2019 Toronto Fringe Festival, so it isn’t in the printed program. This absence of advertising means that Knight needs (kneads?) all the help she can get to avoid playing to small houses. That would be a shame, as her passionate, well-written and partially autobiographical show about the lengths mothers will go to make sure their children are fed deserves an audience.

Millennial Knight is attending a bread-baking class; a very bourgeois act, she admits, for a woman who grew up on welfare. As she wrestles with the dough and whether or not to snap a selfie of her yeast-wrangling, she reminisces about her mother’s struggle to raise three children as a pot-scrubber, and her resolute belief that pride bows before sustenance. She’s also catapulted back to the story of Annie Moore, the Irishwoman who was the first immigrant to cross through Ellis Island, and a more present story of a young nurse on a school placement in Zambia, combating both AIDS and childhood malnutrition.

Continue reading The Art of Kneading (Farenheight350) 2019 Toronto Fringe Review →